


Say the Magic Words: III

by reconditarmonia



Series: Say the Magic Words [3]
Category: Spinning Silver - Naomi Novik
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 3, F/F, Future Fic, Gen, Golems, Magic, Period-Typical Antisemitism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23023912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/pseuds/reconditarmonia
Summary: Wanda finds her magic when it is needed most.
Relationships: Miryem Mandelstam/Wanda Vitkus
Series: Say the Magic Words [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1660381
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27
Collections: Purimgifts 2020





	Say the Magic Words: III

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kass/gifts).



Miryem’s strength was faltering; I could see it in the way she held herself, familiar after so many years. The wind whipped about her hair, which was streaked with silver through the dark brown, and her dress, gusting first in one direction, then another, as she and the king tried to keep the king’s road open for people to flee.

First it had been a trickle as one or two at a time crashed into the Staryk country, no matter what tales they’d heard at a grandmother’s knee of the dangers of the shining road. Now it was a flood. I lifted bundles or small children from the arms of men with sidelocks, or took the stumbling weight of women whose dark faces were pale and drawn with pain, helping them further in. It was all I could do. I wasn’t alone, not when Staryk around me were aiding their human kinfolk; even the Staryk rabbi was here. In the distance, beyond the trampled snow and bloody footprints and the trees of the Staryk world, I could make out the trees of the human world; beyond them, fire and shouting and the clash of spears where the Staryk knights, Miryem’s two sons among them, held off the pursuers.

“Only a few more moments,” I heard the king calling to Miryem, loud over the wind and the chaos, “then it will be enough -- pursue who will, our kingdom’s doors will be closed to them.”

Nearby, a young man supported an elderly one by the arm, and a Staryk woman hurried to relieve him. To my surprise, when he had seen the old man -- I didn’t know if he was a grandfather, a neighbor, a rabbi -- steadied, he turned back the way he had come.

“This way, quick!” I said. Soon enough Miryem and the king would stop holding the road, and instead of the path from his world to theirs, there would lie only more of the winter country on our side, and more destruction on his.

He set his jaw and looked me in the eye. “This is my home. Our home. We’re not leaving.” And then I realized that there must be more in the fire behind, still fighting. People who would rather die in the houses they were born in than give them up, and Miryem might not know. I couldn’t stop the young man from swimming against that tide and vanishing in the trees, but I ran to Miryem.

“There are still people in the village,” I cried as I approached. She was standing now with her hand against a birch tree, half propping herself up and half letting the magic flow from her hand through its roots into the icy ground. I wrapped my arms around her so she could lean against me and give more of her strength to the magic, pressing my lips to her temple. Over the years, she’d learned to use the powers of a Staryk queen, and even now it amazed me that her small body could hold it all. But she’d saved me before she had any magic at all. 

“We’ll hold the road open as long as it takes,” she said, with her fingers still brushing the tree’s white bark and her other hand in my hair, and a tension in her body that I could feel.

I hadn’t made her understand. “No -- they want to stay and fight.” A moment, then, as Miryem looked at me -- a moment filled with years of a life lived in a house like an island, in another town where every road led to the door of someone who hated her. Then she was pushing off the tree and running towards the king, the ice hardening and sparkling where her feet fell. 

The next moments were a blur. I knew some of the knights went galloping to the village, but there weren’t enough to do that and also protect those who were fleeing. I saw Staryk nobles raise the snow into the shapes of beasts and send them off running, but these didn’t make it far before dissolving into powder. Near me, the Staryk rabbi had drawn the ice into the form of a great shapeless man, who stood there motionless with its head bowed as he scratched words into the ice of its body, trying one thing after another.

“Tell me what to write,” I said. Because I knew, suddenly, how I could help. I knew what magic I had in this land. I’d had it all along. He turned in surprise, and I kept going. “My wife -- the queen, Miryem -- gave me this magic, many years ago. Let me try, only tell me what to write.” 

So the rabbi told me, though he had to explain as though it were Yiddish, which I had learned a little. I half-held my breath as I wrote the words on the creature’s limbs, thinking of how Miryem had crouched in the dirt with me and drawn letters and numbers with a stick. I’d traced them after her, shaped the sounds of the letters in her book with my lips and tongue and then kept the records myself, and I thought then that it was magic. I tried to remember how I saw them first, mysterious signs laden with hidden meaning, and how I felt when that power became mine.

I couldn’t know for sure it would work, even as I wrote with my finger in the softer snow of the creature’s forehead. But if this was a country where a moneylender’s daughter could really touch silver and change it to gold, then maybe I could have magic in my letters for real. I drew the tail of the final letter, and a shock went through me as the creature drew a breath, its icy body expanding, and stood up -- it was far taller than I was. Shivering, or tingling, with the knowledge that I’d done this, I watched it lumber off to fight alongside its people.


End file.
